For me, it’s the fact that it is an incredibly powerful tool, that can be understood by many, that provides tangible benefits like reproducibility and deterministic builds to many programming languages. The fact that it works so well(no, it doesn’t work everywhere, or perfectly!) is a testament to the incredible work by thousands of contributors over more than 20 years.
the people. no matter who i talk to in this community they are so deeply passionate about nix. and its so lovely to see their face light up whilst you listen to the awesome ideas they have on how to make nix an even better place for us all.
With NixOS, anyone can be a distro developer. The whole OS is produced by the Nix code in one monorepo. If there’s anything you don’t like about it, you can go in and change it. That makes it maximally customizable and I find it a ton of fun.
But I’ll expand a bit more. NixOS kind of acts like the best documentation in the world for any given aspect of a Linux operating system, because it’s a massive case of document by example. If you ever want to know how a feature of the OS works, you can just go look at the NixOS module that implements it. I know “read the code” doesn’t really count as good documentation, but the fact that NixOS offers the option for literally any part of the OS all in one place is awesome to me.
The community, who have taken it upon themselves to formally write down hundreds of thousands of lines of sysadmin lore that everyone can now benefit from by using nixpkgs.
I think the fact that nix is at the point in which adoption is growing. Nix has been around longer than many tools like Docker but hasn’t had a wave in adoption. It’s now at the point in which even companies like Google are starting to use them. It means people who have spent a long time helping Nix get to the point it is at now could potentially be doing this as their job. It also means we can get software written better for the Nix way of doing things. A lot of software has to be patched to fit into the Nix world. Now imagine if more companies adopt Nix and start fixing their software. We could potentially see a wave in software design that makes new and existing software fit Nix without us maintaining patches or hacks.